Posts Tagged ‘drugs’
Ireland’s Best Chance Ever for Effective Drugs Policy Reform
As the Citizens’ Assembly on Drugs Use meets for the fourth time (2nd, 3rd September), it is at a crucial point which will determine its usefulness. Either it will move on to examine the broad range of drugs use and wider policy or it will continue to ignore and exclude 90% of its subject from consideration, focusing only on problematic use and treatment services.
Whatever recommendations the the Citizens’ Assembly on Drugs Use makes, it is up to the government to decide on them. Same-sex marriage and abortion rights achieved legislative reform through this route but response to the recent Citizens’ Assembly on Biodiversity Loss has been very different. The government and our political leaders have failed to implement any its 150 recommendations to protect nature. It was almost certainly a mistake to make so many recommendations and this has given politicians the excuse they need to turn away and fail to act. It could well be the same on the difficult and controversial issue of drugs.
Yet nothing demands more immediate and urgent action. All the violence, disorder and anti social behaviour about which there is so much concern is driven by criminal drugs markets. Demand for drugs comes from within our communities. It is our families, our sons, daughters, brothers, sisters, mothers and fathers that are the customers of these criminal gangs. While in 90% of cases their drug use causes no harm to themselves or others, they enrich and empower the gangsters and government has done nothing to regulate these markets to reduce all the harm they cause.
While politicians refuses to acknowledge and provide sensible and safe legal access for drugs, particularly cannabis, all they do is turn the forces of law enforcement against the communities they are supposed to protect and add to the power and wealth of the drugs gangs.
It is the criminal markets that cause so much harm and only a small proportion of drugs users that suffer health harms. Street dealing, violence, child exploitation, debt intimidation, human trafficking, modern slavery, all these evils stem from the criminal markets which bad drugs policy has allowed to proliferate. And the health harms of drugs are maximised when criminals control their production and distribution, when there is no regulation, quality control, age limits or harm reduction infomation and education provided.
This is Ireland’s best chance ever for effective drugs policy reform and huge responsibility now rests on the shoulders of Paul Reid, chair of the Citizens’ Assembly. In the remaining three meetings, will he encompass the broad agenda which the issue demands or will we continue only to hear about one, narrow aspect?
Clearly, problematic drug use has a terrible impact on those involved and their families but we already know that the answer is properly funded treatment services. Also, problematic drug use drives violent and acquisitive crime as users have no option but to access drugs from criminals at high cost. The answer here is also properly funded treatment services but also regulation of markets, so that legal access is possible but in controlled and safe circumstances.
We need properly funded treatment services, safe consumption rooms, decriminalisation of the user, legally regulated access for adults at least to cannabis, MDMA and possibly cocaine, drug testing services, education and harm reduction services.
Such intelligent, evidence-based and progressive drugs policy will drive the gangsters off our streets. It will stop the violence, the mugging, the anti social behaviour of feral youth, It will reduce health harms, overdoses deaths and all sorts of crime. But it requires courage. It needs politicians to take decisions that will attract the fury of the older, reactionary, authoritarian wing of society but unless we takes these steps then Ireland’s drugs problem is only going to get worse. The demand isn’t going away and unless we find a sensible way of meeting it in safe, regulated fashion then the violent gangsters and everything that flows from their activity will continue.
Our Immigration Policy Costs Lives with Exactly the Same Muddled Thinking As Our Drugs Policy
The parallels are exact. It’s all about supply and demand. Just as there is a huge demand for drugs, there is huge demand to come and live in the UK. Unless legitimate access is provided at reasonable cost and convenience then it is inevitable that criminals will move in to meet that demand.
People are dying because of the way our government enforces these brutal, badly-thought out policies. Preventing these deaths has to be our priority. Prejudice about drug consumers and xenophobia about refugees has to be put aside.
We have the same slow-witted, myopic politicians in charge of both policies and they are incapable of addressing these issues rationally. Don’t think it’s just the Conservatives though, the Labour Party is barely any different. In fact, to listen to the shadow home secretary, Nick Thomas-Symonds, it’s easy to see him being even more hardline on drugs and immigration than Priti Patel.
It’s a truism that all politicians are the same but certainly on these dog whistle issues in Britain, both parties seem to compete to see who can appease Daily Mail readers most effectively and win their support.
Politicians hold delusional and arrogant beliefs that the ‘messages they send’ actually make any difference to people and that when they make laws people are going to obey them without question. When people see that laws are irrational, unfair and work against their interests they don’t want to obey. And when we’re referring to issues of vital importance such as coping with addiction or being able to live decently and in peace with your family, politicians’ pathetic, badly-thought out rules are the last thing that anyone will follow.
You only have to watch these fools of ministers and MPs rolled out in front of the cameras to comment on the latest tragedy, be it the 27 people who drowned in the channel last week, the latest drug deaths figures or the number of young people whose prospects have been ruined because they were caught with a bit of weed, a gram of cocaine or a couple of ecstasy tablets.
“We have to crack down on these vile criminal gangs,” they say. Which is correct, of course, the only long-term solution is to remove the trade in drugs and immigration from the gangsters. But that really isn’t the point, is it? While people are still overloading tiny inflatable dinghies to cross the channel or selling sexual services to be able to inject heroin cut with cement dust into their veins, they are where the focus should be. There’s no purpose trying to divert attention to criminals who don’t care anyway. Government’s responsibility is to protect people, first and foremost.
Applying for refugee status is a right, not a privilege and government has to make this accessible, practical and reasonably convenient. It’s our stupid laws that are making people get into these boats because they can’t apply for asylum until they get here. We should permit people to apply for asylum at any British embassy anywhere in the world. If they can demonstrate to a reasonable standard of proof that they are fleeing war or persecution, we must give them asylum there and then. That is our legal and moral obligation.
Our irresponsible politicians are the cause of these criminal gangs, whether they are supplying the entry to Britain or the access to drugs that people want. If these demands were being satisfactorily met, with appropriate controls, the gangsters would be put out of business.
We need emergency solutions to cope with the disaster that our politicians have created. For refugees that means enabling asylum claims from outside our borders. For drugs it means overdose prevention centres and a return to the very succesful ‘British System’ of the 1960s where addicts were prescribed diamorphine (pharmaceutical grade heroin). Under this system we had about 3,000 registered addicts in the UK. Since we scrapped it in favour of hard line prohibition that figure has grown to 350,000.
Perhaps the most difficult aspect of both these problems is that our politicians have got them both wrong, very wrong and they are going to have to admit that in order to implement the solution. Can they? Are they ‘man enough’ to admit their mistakes. Because what is certain, without doubt, is that politicians are the problem.
If Rory Stewart wants to use his time and energy for the human rights of people in Afghanistan, off he should go.
Staying there for 20 years was a monumental betrayal of the British people.
I’m more concerned about the human rights of British people living below the poverty line. People who are having children abused by gangs of Asian men who we won’t touch for fear of being called racist. People who have no access to justice because legal aid has been destroyed. People who are dying from contaminated drugs of unknown strength because we have fools in charge of drugs policy. The human rights of British people whose sons and daughters have been killed or mutilated while pursuing the foreign adventures of our so-called ‘leaders’.
At great cost of lives and money we have trained 300,000 Afghanis to defend themselves. Now they’re all running away.
My Predictions for Cannabis in the UK in 2021
On medicinal cannabis, the senior clinicians and bureaucrats at NHS, NICE and the professional medical bodies will continue to do all they can to block access. Until key individuals are offered fat fees to run clinical trials they will continue to insist that this is the only form of evidence that is acceptable. They will continue to ignore and reject all evidence from overseas. The clamour from more and more patients will grow. The private clinics will boom but our political ‘leaders’ will continue to be impotent in the face of the vested interests of the medical establishment.
The Cancard will take off and police forces will welcome it as a sensible solution. More and more people will grow their own and cannabis will become completely decriminalised by default. Only if you’re behaving like an idiot or are engaged in large scale commercial grows and/or gangsterism will the police be interested. Again our political ‘leaders’ will be useless and too scared of the tabloid media and their bigoted, poorly-informed backbenchers to do anything. Meanwhile the cannabis trade will continue to drive county lines, knife crime, prostitution, modern slavery, all off the back of profits from cannabis but Boris and his buffoons will refuse to understand this or follow the evidence that legal regulation is the solution.
The Food Standards Agency (FSA), in collaboration with the big business lobbyists, The Association for the Cannabinoid Industry (ACI) , will succeed in getting all the multiples and major retailers to stop selling whole plant CBD extracts, which are what work and what consumers want. Dozens of small CBD companies who actually built this market will be put out of business by the FSA/ACI and hundreds of people will lose their jobs. FSA/ACI will continue to ramp up their false propaganda that CBD can be toxic despite a complete absence of any real world evidence – all this with the intention of pricing small, artisan suppliers out of the market. Nasty, ineffective, isolate-based products will come to dominate the high street. Despite this, whole plant extracts will continue to be available online and the FSA will discover that it can’t enforce its rules because its definition of ‘novel food’ doesn’t actually fit genuine whole plant extracts. They will bring prosecutions against some suppliers but these will fail once expert evidence is adduced.
The legal British cannabis market will continue to develop in faltering steps because of the obstacles inherent in the way the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971 is applied. The government is terrified to undertake the wholesale reform that is urgently needed because of outdated and ignorant attitudes. It’s so transfixed by the drugs issue that it won’t even make the small tweaks to regulations on industrial hemp, exempt products and licensing that would give a massive boost to business prospects. I can see no chance of any progress until the Covid crisis is over and ministers have more bandwidth to look at other issues. Even then it’s going to need some new blood in cabinet. Although Boris Johnson himself probably does have the instinct for reform, he is surrounded by third rate ministers, most of whom could never be considered progressive and are hardly visionary or ambitious thinkers.
The Birch-Moore cartel will continue to try and monopolise the entire British cannabis space. Paul Birch, the multimillionaire stoner who landed a fortune from shares in his brother’s business, provides the cash and Steve Moore, former architect of David Cameron’s damp squib ‘Big Society’ project, runs the show. Volteface, Centre for Medicinal Cannabis, the ACI, Hanway Associates, Familes4Access are all different faces of the same core team, all characterised by generous funding, a young, aggressive team and an arrogant disdain for everyone else in the market. Birch’s money has definitely brought some welcome benefits and was the missing ingredient in achieving the media coverage which led to the legalisation of medicinal cannabis in 2018. They took ideas and policies developed by other groups and added a well-funded PR operation because the reality is that however important your message, without the hard cash you just don’t get coverage on daytime TV and the main news programmes. Aside from causing great division, particularly amongst the families campaigning for their epileptic children, the negative and malevolent aspects of their work is best demonstrated by the ACI’s manipulation of the CBD market and bullying of many small businesses.
I’m hopeful that at least in Scotland, which has the worst drug deaths record in Europe, there will be some progress on dealing with problematic hard drug use and its consequences. The heroic actions of Peter Krykant, who is illegally running a mobile drugs consumption room in Glasgow and saving lives every day, have had a big impact. This man deserves every bit as much praise as Captain Tom, Marcus Rashford or anyone else who has engaged in altruistic campaigning in 2020. He deserves a knighthood. As I write this, the latest reports suggest Nicola Sturgeon might even defy the dinosaurs in Westminster and fund appropriate harm reduction measures which are so desperately needed.
Until our political ‘leaders’ wake up to the fact that the entire criminal drugs market and the tens of billions it costs the UK are driven by the prohibition of cannabis there will be no real progress either on reducing the cost or improving public health. The kids who are being stabbed on London’s streets, the young people who are trafficked and the vulnerable hard drug addicts who are being cuckooed as part of county lines dealing, it all starts with the criminal trade in cannabis. That’s where the money comes from and until the market is taken away from the gangsters and properly regulated, things will only get worse.
Although we’ve all despaired about some aspects of the US political system, the progress on cannabis, even in Republican states, shows what real democracy can achieve. Local ballots have forced reluctant and often hostile politicians to comply with what the people want and make cannabis legally available. The Biden-Harris team have promised federal decriminalisation and expungement of criminal records for all non-violent cannabis offences. I think this will happen. Even if the Republicans retain control of the Senate this issue has built up a head of steam that won’t be stopped. Remarkably, the one issue that transcends the terrible divides in American politics is cannabis. If the Senate goes Democrat we could see much more far-reaching change. And once the federal law on cannabis changes, you watch all the slimeball politicians throughout the rest of the world pretending that’s what they wanted all along.
Overall, I am optimistic. Hopefully, as we head through summer and into autumn next year, Covid will be behind us, we’ll all be back to earning a proper living and a lot closer to enjoying our cannabis in freedom, for pleasure, medicine or both. My very best wishes and the compliments of the season.
Cannabis Professionals. The Trade Association for the UK’s Cannabis, CBD and Hemp Businesses
Cannabis Professionals (CannaPro) is the trade association for the UK’s cannabis, CBD and hemp businesses.
CannaPro will represent this fast-growing sector to the authorities, standing up to the Home Office, MHRA, FSA and Trading Standards, advocating for members’ interests, not acting as a government enforcer but as our members’ champion and to promote the development of the legal cannabis sector.
CannaPro will offer guidance and support to all businesses, helping them to navigate through law and regulations on drugs, medicines, food and cosmetics.
CannaPro will also launch a social media campaign, aiming to inform and educate the public about the benefits of CBD and the pitfalls. The market is full of scammers, fake claims and snake oil salesmen. Because of the historic stigma and fear around cannabis, government authorities are doing nothing, many people are misinformed and misunderstand. CannaPro will explain the facts clearly and direct consumers to certified businesses which they can rely on.
Membership of CannaPro is without charge. All guidance will be published openly for everyone to benefit from. Free-of-charge support and answers to individual questions will be available online.
Businesses wishing to be certified by CannaPro will be reviewed for their products, trading standards, marketing and conduct. Certified companies will be entitled to display the CannaPro badge as a mark of quality, ethics and reliability.
Backed by CLEAR, the UK’s longest-established cannabis group with a network exceeding all other UK drugs policy groups combined, CannaPro members will benefit from CLEAR’s wide reach and influence with UK consumers.
Website: https://cannapro-uk.org
Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/cannapro/
Lazy, Self-Serving, Incompetent MPs Decide To Blame Drug Consumers For The Consequences Of Their Failed Policies.
David Gauke MP, Justice Secretary
This is the latest propaganda and falsehood in the war on drugs. According to David Gauke MP who is the justice secretary, James Cleverly MP, Dr Sarah Wollaston MP and Cressida Dick , the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, it’s our fault, people who consume drugs, that their failed policies have created a gigantic criminal market which uses violence in its turf wars and takes no responsibility for the quality or safety of its products.
James Cleverly MP
Dr Sarah Wollaston MP
These arrogant fools expect to sit in their ivory towers, issue edicts as to what we may or may not put into our own bodies and expect us to comply as well-behaved, dutiful, worker drones.
Their first duty in government is to protect us and they are failing abysmally. They should be creating safe, regulated drugs markets where people can buy what they want in civilised conditions knowing that quality is assured, strength is known and proper labelling tells us exactly what we are getting. Instead they are doing exactly the opposite. They abandon all responsibility to criminal gangs and their hands are dripping in the blood of the violence and deaths that ensue.
All the arguments have been won. There is no doubt that way to minimise the harm of drugs is to regulate them and make them available under strict conditions in accordance with their potential for harm. At a stroke this will virtually eliminate the harms of the criminal market which are by far the most significant harms for drugs such as cannabis and MDMA. In known strength and quality the health harms of these drugs are almost insignificant. For dangerous drugs such as opiates, cocaine and alcohol, regulation should be much stricter, opiates probably prescription only but their health harms will be minimised and decent services can be put in place, funded by taxing legal markets, to help those who fall victim to them.
Cressida Dick, Metropolitan Police Commissioner
The war on drugs is actually a war on people who choose different drugs from the ones these arrogant and deluded politicians determine to be acceptable. This latest, vile denial of their responsibility for the highest ever rate of drug deaths and for the epidemic of drug-related violence is disgusting. It is a direct attack on the people they are supposed to protect. We must bring these tyrants down. Anyone who seriously espouses this idea that consumers are responsible for their failed policies is unfit to hold public office. It’s negligence, malfeasance and the most serious dereliction of duty.
The Views Of Dr Sarah Wollaston MP On Drugs Policy. A Worrying Case Requiring A Good Dose of Evidence.
Dr Sarah Wollaston MP is chair of the cross party Health Select Committee. She was a practising GP but is now the most senior Westminster politician, not in government, who has expertise in health and medicine.
The views she expresses are extremely worrying because they betray a complete failure to take note of the evidence, particularly surprising because of her profession.
I responded by explaining legalising drugs doesn’t mean a free for all, it means the opposite. We have a free for all now because control has been abandoned to criminal gangs. Regulation must be in accordance with a drug’s potential for harm. It’s more urgent to legalise and regulate dangerous drugs. Keeping crack and heroin supply in the hands of criminals maximises harms through unknown strength and contamination as well as violence and street dealing. Clean, safe supplies should be available in conjunction with therapy at reducing doses. It’s simply absurd that cannabis is illegal and this idiotic policy supports crime and creates a £6 billion criminal market with massive consequential harms. It is shameful and national disgrace that our government continues with this idiocy.
There is very little health harm from cannabis. Healthcare records prove this. There are more health harms from peanuts. 99% of harms of cannabis are created by goverment policy. Ignorance, prejudice and cowardice are the defining characteristics of UK drugs policy.
Dr Wollaston suggests that drug consumers are responsible for the violence and criminal activity around the drugs trade. I say this is utter nonsense. It is for the government to take responsibility!! That’s what you’re paid for. Take this market out of criminal hands and PROTECT people. It is disgusting to blame consumers for the harms of the drugs market which are caused by government. How dare you blame consumers for the harms of the criminal drugs market which irresponsible governments have created! UK drugs policy MAXIMISES all health and social harms. We are plagued by ignorant, stubborn, anti-evidence fools in government who are killing our children.
It is shocking that you and colleagues in government can be so trapped in ignorance and denial of the vast amount of evidence from across the world that legal regulation minimises all drug harms. If UK drugs policy was in the dock then it would get a whole life sentence.
This is an appalling abdication of responsibility by a senior politician. Dr Wollaston isn’t in government but she echoes the evil attitude of ministers who cause most harms around drugs by their idiotic policies. It is government that must take responsibility not consumers. Do your job!!
I have written to Dr Wollaston asking if she will meet me so that I may show her the evidence she is overlooking.
Victoria Atkins MP, The UK Drugs Minister, Opposes Drugs Regulation While Her Husband Grows 45 Acres of Cannabis Under Government Licence.
The UK’s New Princess Of Prohibition: Dishonesty, Hypocrisy, Corruption And Cruelty Behind A Pretty Face.
There are many examples of wilful ignorance, blind prejudice and bare faced dishonesty on drugs policy from many former and current MPs. There is no one though who plumbs the depths of deception and hypocrisy as the new drugs minister Victoria Atkins.
Her recent performance in the Westminster Hall debate on drug consumption rooms (DCR) was riddled with inaccuracies, distorted information and downright falsehood about the success of such facilities throughout the world. She simply told brazen untruths in order to support her rejection of the clamour from other MPs to introduce DCRs because they are proven to save lives. I can do no better than Transform in explaining her behaviour. Its press release sets out her lies in detail. Ronnie Cowan MP even raised a point of order and then a Home Office question about her scandalous dishonesty but as usual the government just brushed aside any criticism.
Victoria Atkins: Barrister, MP, Home Office Minister, Dishonest And Corrupt To The Core
Ms Atkins is the daughter of Sir Robert Atkins, a former Conservative MP and MEP. She studied law at Cambridge and was called to the bar at Middle Temple in 1998. She has practised as a barrister and was formerly listed as a member of Red Lion Chambers. She has been appointed to the Attorney General’s Regulators Panel and the Serious Fraud Office’s List of specialist fraud prosecutors. She claims to have been involved in the prosecution of major, international, drugs gangs and that this, somehow or another, qualifies her as an expert in drugs policy.
I relate her background because it is clear that she is a highly intelligent, clever and well informed woman. This makes her dishonesty, hypocrisy and corruption all the more serious and completely inexcusable.
Ms Atkins has replaced Sarah Newton as drugs minister. Ms Newton didn’t last long, perhaps because she couldn’t stand the ridicule that she was subjected to for trying to hold the line on the government’s ridiculous drugs policy. When she tried to claim that alcohol isn’t really that damaging compared to illicit drugs, she had MPs either gasping in amazement or chuckling in amusement. Ms Atkins was clearly spotted for the job because she is one of the few MPs still enthusiastic about prohibition.
Paul Kenward, Victoria Atkins’s husband, grows cannabis under government licence
But of course, it’s specifically on cannabis that I must call Ms Atkins to account. Aside from the usual, hysterical and evidence-free claims that so-called ‘skunk’ cannabis is causing an enormous increase in mental illness, which she trots out repeatedly, she rejects any idea of regulation in drugs policy as a means of reducing harm. In the drugs policy debate on 18th July 2017 (before she was appointed drugs minister) she said:
and “I do not share the optimism of others about tackling the problem through regulation.”
Paul Kenward’s Cannabis Greenhouse
However, in what must be the most blatant hypocrisy ever from a government minister, Ms Atkins benefits directly from regulation of drugs. She is married to Paul Kenward, managing director of British Sugar which is growing 45 acres of cannabis under licence in its mammoth Norfolk greenhouse. Mr Kenward is producing high CBD cannabis for use in Epidiolex, GW Pharma’s cannabis extract epilepsy medicine. Ms Atkins has tried to brush this off calling it “…a very different substance (from the) psychoactive version of cannabis.” Of course, anyone with even the most basic knowledge of plant science will know this is nonsense. The difference between different strains of cannabis is the same as the difference between different varieties of tomatoes. Whether they’re Ailsa Craig or Alicante, they’re all tomatoes.
With this latest scandal the shameful truth about UK drugs policy and the corrupt nature of this Conservative government is highlighted once again. It is difficult to believe this bare faced dishonesty can prevail in a country that was once held up as an example of honour and decency but as with so much that Theresa May has been responsible for since she entered government in 2010, we are disgraced, shamed and the electorate is treated with absolute contempt.
‘This House Would Say No To Drugs’, The Oxford Union, 16th February 2017.
Peter Reynolds, Stephen DeAngelo
On Thursday, 16th February 2017, the Oxford Union held a debate on the motion ‘This House Would Say No To Drugs’.
I was honoured to be invited to speak against the motion in the august company of Paul Hayes and Stephen DeAngelo. Speaking for the motion were Andrew Ng, Assistant Commissioner Patricia Gallan and Shaun Attwood.
We successfully defeated the motion by approximately 120 votes to 90. A video of the debate will be released shortly. I reproduce my speech below.
“Reefer makes darkies think they’re as good as white men.”
These are the words of Harry Anslinger, who in 1930 was appointed the first ever commissioner of the US Federal Bureau of Narcotics.
And this is the exactly same standard of argument and evidence that we have in favour of drug prohibition today.
Anslinger went on to start the war on drugs 40 years before Richard Nixon invented the term. His anti-cannabis crusade was based on racism, the suggestion that it caused madness, violence and depravity – yes, the same scare stories, myths and deceit that we still see published every day in the pages of the Daily Mail and the Daily Telegraph. Indeed, exactly the same nonsense which every home secretary continues to trot out and on which our present prime minister bases UK drugs policy.
Don’t be in any doubt about it, the Home Office, under successive governments, has been engaged in the systematic deception of the British public. It misleads, misinforms and repeatedly publishes bare faced lies about drugs and drugs policy and subverts every effort towards reform advocated by more enlightened politicians.
In 2013, according to Norman Baker and Nick Clegg, Theresa May tried to falsify the international comparators report which showed that across the world harsh penalties make no difference to the level of drug use. The facts simply don’t fit with her ideology.
And this idiocy pervades our society. It is reflected in this motion which I oppose. The premise of ‘This House Would Say No to Drugs’ is false from the very start. It’s preposterous! We all say yes to drugs, every day, inevitably, in cocktails of medicines and recreational stimulants, in food, drink, in endogenous highs released through exercise and emotions, repeatedly, regularly, all of us, without exception, do drugs.
That our governments have seen fit to draw arbitrary lines as to which drugs are acceptable and which are not, which drugs that we can celebrate and which we will be locked up for, has nothing to do with evidence, science and, least of all, absolutely nothing to do with how harmful or dangerous they are. They are based on prejudice and thinking in 2017 that has advanced no further than Harry Anslinger in 1930.
Sometimes these prejudices have strange echoes in the past. Coffee was banned in Mecca in 1511, as it was believed to stimulate radical thinking – the governor thought it might unite his opposition. What does that remind you of?
Often these lines are not arbitrary, they are based on vested interests. In 1777, Frederick the Great of Prussia also tried to ban coffee. He argued it interfered with the country’s beer consumption. Before the first International Opium Convention in 1925 Egyptian cotton farmers successfully lobbied for cannabis to be banned as they feared the superior fibre crop of hemp. Back to Harry Anslinger and he was in league with the timber barons who greatly feared the far better option of using hemp to make paper and the fledging oil industry which had just invented nylon, a synthetic alternative to the job that hemp fibre had done for thousands of years. When Henry Ford invented the Model T he designed it to run on ethanol produced from hemp. He planted hemp on his own land for the purpose. It’s no conspiracy theory to argue that the entire oil industry in predicated on the prohibition of cannabis, it’s just good, solid evidence.
Today, in the UK, prohibition of much safer substances like cannabis and MDMA is enforced to preserve the monopoly of legal recreational drugs that belongs to the alcohol industry – a drug that is at least a dangerous as heroin and causes far more misery and death in our society. It’s no surprise when the UK alcohol industry spends £800 million every year on advertising that the media which enjoys that income supports the alcohol monopoly.
As if we didn’t have the clearest possible lesson from the prohibition of alcohol which gave birth to organised crime and demonstrated beyond any doubt that prohibition never works, it just makes the problem worse.
The UK is more backwards, more disgraced, more shamed by a drugs policy that causes far more harm than it prevents, than almost any other first world country.
Prohibition is a fundamentally immoral policy. If you remember one thing that I say today, please make it this. It sets law enforcement against the communities it is supposed to protect. Being a police office is a noble and honourable calling. Every society needs policing but drugs policy has perverted this profession. The demand for what are deemed illicit drugs comes from society but instead of protecting us from danger, police action increases the dangers we are subject to. The harder the police clamp down, the more the price of drugs rises, the more unscrupulous and violent the unregulated criminal trade becomes and the more contaminated, more concentrated and more dangerous are the drugs themselves.
In Amsterdam, there is no problem with Spice, the synthetic cannabinoid that is ravaging our streets and British prisons at present. In sane, civilised society like California, Colorado or Washington, where adults can access safe, properly regulated cannabis, there is no Spice problem like we have in the UK. This disgusting, horrible product is the direct responsibility of the politicians who continue to pursue our ignorant anti-cannabis policy. It is just one example of the great, immoral evil that prohibition causes. And I ask you, if this crazy policy of prohibition cannot be enforced in prisons, then how do we expect to enforce it in wider society?
It is prohibition and drugs policy based on prejudice that destroys police and community relations. It is current policy that means 70% of all acquisitive crime is caused by drug addiction – for which we send sick and poorly people to jail where they find easy access to more and nastier drugs. This is the real madness that drugs cause. It is the madness of deranged government ministers and their refusal to consider evidence or to resist pressure from their masters in Fleet Street.
What we need to do is say yes to a drugs policy that is designed to reduce harm and protect our communities. Alcohol is promoted and so easily available as to be ridiculous, in every other shop on the high street, yet we control the access of children to alcohol and tobacco quite effectively. But we abandon them to the street weed dealer who sells them muck grown by other children who have been trafficked from overseas and locked in hidden farms which are dangerous fire risks. This is the shameful reality that our policies have produced.
Doctors freely prescribe anti-depressants, tranquilisers, highly toxic opioids such as tramadol, weird drugs for pain and epilepsy like gabapentin, which we don’t really understand at all. Yet it is a criminal offence for a doctor to prescribe cannabis, a remedy that mankind has used safely and effectively for at least 10,000 years.
We mislead and misinform. We encourage young people to go out and drink, yet we make ecstasy, MDMA, a drug far safer than even paracetamol, a class A substance , and we threaten people with years in jail just for handing a single dose to a friend. It’s estimated that between two and ten million doses of MDMA are taken every weekend in the UK and we get about 50 deaths a year. 200 people die every year from paracetamol. How much safer would MDMA be if the product was regulated with known strength and purity? It would probably be virtually harmless.
Now everyone is a victim of this drug war propaganda and the terrible effects of prohibition. Politicians, police officers, social workers, mothers and fathers have all been drenched in this propaganda from birth. Many sincerely believe the rubbish they have been fed and they do all they can to pass on misguided ideas to the next generation.
We need to grow up, get a grip and drag Britain out of the dark ages. Drugs can cause harm but British drugs policy is a scourge on our society. It damages the lives of millions and costs us billions. Please oppose the motion, saying no to drugs is a nonsense. Let’s say yes to a rational drugs policy.
Peter Reynolds 